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Big data issues: Big data analytics offers both rewards and risks

The volume of data that businesses collect is exploding exponentially. This includes financial transactions, location-based data, customer interactions, the supply chain, as well as data produced by employees, contractors, partners and suppliers using social networking sites, intranets, extranets, and corporate wikis. In fact, sources such as mobile and online transactions, social media traffic and GPS coordinates now generate more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of "big data" every day, according to IBM.. The commercial impacts of big data analytics – the practice of performing increasingly sophisticated analysis on massive amounts of data, predominantly unstructured – have the potential to generate significant productivity growth for a number of vertical industry sectors. In short, big data analytics presents an opportunity to create unprecedented business advantage and better service delivery. At the same time, it promises benefits for information security while also presenting increased risks. Senior executives and boards the ...